Back in the 1950s, nobody knew who Flannery O’Connor really was. Her powerful,
grotesque, and unforgiving stories burned themselves into the reader, and only
a few close friends knew she was a quiet little Catholic woman from
Milledgeville, Georgia. Like O’Connor before him, novelist Larry Brown writes
with an intensity that’s sometimes nearly unbearable. And like O’Connor,
Brown’s private bearing belies his frightening literary presence. With an easy
laugh and a quiet, unassuming charm, Brown hardly seems the fiery, unflinching
literary persona that has gained so much attention in the past few years.

Brown’s last novel, Joe,
evokes such a pathos for his characters that it almost transcended fiction. In
his novel before that, Dirty Work, which focused on the aftermath of
Vietnam, Brown took on God himself. His new novel, Father and Son, lives
up both to Brown’s literary reputation and to its portentous title.

A dark, disturbing look at a
small southern town in the late 1960s, Father and Son follows the
troubled Glen Davis on a rampage through the other characters’ lives and
deaths. Fresh out of the state pen for an alcohol-related vehicular homicide,
Glen takes up old loves and hatreds where he thinks he’s left them, but as his
ex-lover Jewel says, “Things has changed.”

“I like to start off with a
character in trouble,” Brown said in an interview during his book-tour stop in
Minneapolis, “and see where it leads. That’s where I start all my stories, with
a character, and I like to follow them around, see what happens, and eventually
it leads to some kind of conclusion I didn’t know was coming.”

Glen begins as a character similar to the main character
of Joe—a flawed but essentially sympathetic character in trouble. But
Brown takes the familiar misunderstood rebel theme and stretches it to its breaking
point. His first night back, Glen kills Barlow, a slimy bar owner he sees as
the reason for his prison sentence. Then he goes on to rape a young woman he
picks up around town, all the while ignoring his responsibilities to Jewel and to his four-year-old son, David.

“I wanted to see if I could create an even less
sympathetic character than Joe, but still make you care about him,” Brown says.
“I wanted to have this nasty guy with almost no redeeming qualities, but make
you look at his past, what made him the way he is—and maybe not like him, but
at least see where he’s coming from.”

This isn’t easy, but as Glen increases in his evil
intensity, the reality of his circumstances makes him understandable, if not
sympathetic. Brown’s greatest talent lies in his ability to get inside
different characters’ heads, and with Glen he succeeds in creating a horrific,
warped mind that's entirely believable—even inevitable.

As the reader’s hopes turn away from Glen, the characters
he sees as his enemies rise to take his place. The novel’s beginning
paints Glen’s father, Virgil, as a worthless drunk, but as Glen’s credibility
shrinks, Virgil’s character gains in richness. Bobby Blanchard, the town’s
lawman and Jewel’s new suitor, also slowly shifts in the reader’s sympathy.
From seeming like little more than the ominous and antagonistic face of law,
Bobby ultimately ends up as one of the novel’s most genuinely likable
characters.

“I didn’t know any of these things was gonna happen,”
Brown says. “I just had this idea of a guy coming back home after being in
prison—coming back and going to the cemetery right away to see his mama. I
brought in Bobby’s character in the cemetery, but I didn’t know how tied up he
was gonna get, how much he has to do with Glen’s story.”

As the novel progresses, the relationships become more and
more intertwined. The reader slowly learns that Virgil dated Bobby’s mother,
Mary, before World War II, and that Bobby and Glen are half-brothers. Hence the
Dostoyevskian rivalry. Interestingly, Brown discovered these relationships at about the same time the reader does:

“I kind of figured it out when I was looking at Virgil and
Mary’s pasts,” Brown says, “and as Mary became a more important character, the
relationship just sprung up—and it made a lot of sense. It also made the
tension between Glen and Bobby more understandable.”

Plenty of other things arose—and fell away—as Brown wrote Father
and Son:

“Originally, it was gonna be a novel about the Civil
Rights situation in the ’60s,” Brown says, “and Vietnam too. I grew up with
segregation, and I wanted to write something about what it was like, but those
things got pushed aside as Glen’s story got going. It just turned into a story
about these characters instead.”

Still, Brown keeps a keen eye on the novel’s race
relations. He paints a subtle portrait of the small southern town (based on his
own town just outside of Oxford, Mississippi), and the levels of power are
apparent, even if they aren’t the novel’s focus.

Brown creates the town and its inhabitants so organically
that, even just a few pages into the book, the reader develops a mental map of
its layout. As with the best fiction set in small towns—Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio or Peter Hedges’ What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, for instance—Father
and Son succeeds in making you think you’re there.

“I keep an eye on the things you see every day,” Brown
says, “the roads, the trees, the wind on the grass, the rise and fall of the water. Without
that stuff you don’t really get a good sense of place.”

Even compared to the awesome power of Joe and the
hilarious pain of his second story collection, Big Bad Love, Brown
outdoes himself in Father and Son. His sense of detail is at its peak,
and the writing itself achieves a new level of poetry for Brown.

“I sure do like a pretty sentence,” he says. And with his
uncanny gift for evoking the humanity—and inhumanity—of his characters, Brown
builds the narrative with layer upon layer of penetrating and, at times,
heart-stopping lyricism.

William Faulkner (who shares Brown’s hometown), upon
deciding to become a writer, noted that it was a fine thing to be able to
create a man who has a shadow. Larry Brown’s writing embraces this notion of
real characters whose lives hold true consequence, and with every sentence,
Brown makes his characters actually live. With such nuanced attention to the
things that make us human, Father and Son confidently places Brown among
this country’s finest contemporary writers.

A two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction,
the novelist, short story writer, essayist, and memoirist John Edgar Wideman
never ceases to astonish. His challenging, experimental novels, along with his
occasional appearances on National Public Radio, have left an indelible mark on
America’s artistic and social consciousness.

Wideman released his last book, Fatheralong: A
Meditation on Fathers and Sons, in 1994, but he hasn’t published any
fiction since 1990, when his masterful Philadelphia Fire won him his
second PEN/Faulkner award. So his new novel, The Cattle Killing, arrives
amid a flurry of critical expectation.

The novel’s title refers to the South African Xhosa’s
infamous 1856 cattle killing. The Xhosa were a peaceful, agrarian people whose
livelihoods depended on their cattle, but with the Europeans invading
physically, intellectually, and religiously, the tribe reached a moment of
truth. In a fit of hysteria, Nongqawuse, the daughter of a tribal priest,
received a vision ordering the Xhosa to kill all their cattle.

Wideman recounts the words of the prophecy:

Spread my message to all the clans, daughter. Bid them hear
me well. This evil world is dying. A new one is on its way. The whites will be
driven out. The ancestors will return and dwell again on the earth, bringing
with them endless herds of cattle to fill our kraals.

But only those who kill all their cattle will be welcomed
in this new world. The people must kill their cattle now if they wish to live
forever in peace and harmony when their ancestors return.

Although this act meant suicide for the Xhosa, they
eventually saw that they had no other earthly chance against the encroaching
whites. And while not all of them followed the prophecy, they ultimately
destroyed 400,000 of their cattle, causing a famine that killed more than
40,000 Xhosa.

Wideman uses this episode as the centerpiece of The
Cattle Killing, and even though the novel’s main action takes place in
eighteenth-century Philadelphia, the narrative circles around it, drawing the
various characters in toward it.

Framing the novel with a kind of metafictional meditation,
Wideman himself is drawn into this spiral as a character. Within this frame,
however, the real narrator, an unnamed former slave turned itinerant preacher,
takes over as the novel’s central intelligence. The preacher begins by
explaining that he has visions (probably brought on by epilepsy) that take him
to unimaginable planes of consciousness, giving him an almost godlike clarity.
But the visions invariably give way to violent, horrific fits that cause him to
lose track of time.

The narrative shifts constantly, and it’s never really
clear whom the preacher’s addressing when he’s speaking. He tells his story in
first, second, and third person, and, if that isn’t confusing enough, as the
novel progresses, other voices arise to fill the gaps that he leaves. His main
audience seems to be one of two incarnations of an African maid whom he meets
on his way to Philadelphia. When he first comes across her, she’s fleeing the
plague-ridden city with a dead white baby, and he watches her carry it into a
lake and disappear forever.

Upon reaching Philadelphia (where he aims to help fight the
plague), he hears rumors of her story and finds that the whites believe the
blacks to be not only immune to the plague, but to be its cause. He pieces
together the rumors to find that a prominent white family had expelled her from
their quarantined home because their child became sick. They forced her to take
the child outside the city to die, and thus begins the spiral of events that follow (or, rather, lead up to) her encounter with the preacher.

If all of this sounds perplexing, it probably doesn’t cover
a fifth of The Cattle Killing’s layered storytelling. The preacher tells
his story to his audience, who tells her own story, and within their stories,
their memories tell their own stories. But it all leads to one culminating
central image: the cattle killing.

A parable encompassing hundreds of years of racial horror, The
Cattle Killing succeeds on a level that exceeds even mythmaking to become
truth. Wideman’s prose sears, using the written word to transform the horror of
history into something beautiful. Reaffirming the regenerative power of
storytelling, The Cattle Killing leaves the reader exhausted but
inspired:

Tell me, finally, what is a man. What is a woman. Aren’t
we lovers first, spirits sharing an uncharted space, a space our stories tell,
a space enchanted, written upon again and again, yet one story never quite
erased by the next, each story saving the space, saving itself, saving us. If
someone is listening.

The New Republic calls Wideman “our leading black male writer.” While this
is certainly true, it’s like calling Franz Kafka the greatest German Jewish
writer from Czechoslovakia, or Aretha Franklin the greatest female soul singer.
Of course it’s absurd to separate Wideman’s writing from his race and culture,
but such appellations, however accurate, miss the point. Wideman’s body of
work, especially this novel, distinguishes him as one of the greatest writers—and
minds—of our time.

Question: In all of Western literature, what character is the most widely
scrutinized, admired, deplored, and debated? Who, finding a way into nearly
every novel, story, and essay, resounds more widely and more deeply than any
other? (Hint: It’s not Holden Caulfield) Why, God, of course—Yahweh, Allah,
Jehovah, the Big G Himself.

Whether playing the all-powerful
(if inconsistently characterized) war god in the Hebrew Scriptures, the
resplendent deity in Dante’s Paradiso, or the petty technocrat in Carol
Hill’s The Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, God just won’t stay out of
our literature.

Now, Italian writer and critic
Franco Ferrucci takes Him on again in his new novel, The Life of God (as
Told by Himself). The book originally came out in Italian in 1986, drawing
raves from the Italian critics—notably Umberto Eco—and Ferrucci has finally
translated it, with the help of the now late Raymond Rosenthal, into English.

Drawing mostly from the Bible and
Classical literature, Ferrucci re-imagines the often misconstrued (and always
male) deity as a kind of clueless schlemiel. He has little power—He can create,
but He can’t control—and He can’t seem to get a grip on His own existence.

In this account, the rhetoric of
the vengeful, petty God of the Pentateuch (and latter-day evangelists) proves
inaccurate; this God is more interested in understanding His universe than
lording over it. He’s just like us: He ponders creation; He falls in Love; He
gets depressed, even suicidal. The Bible got a few things right, though: God
has a terrible memory, and He’s often so wrapped up in Himself that He misses
great lengths of earthly history:

For long stretches at a time I
forget that I am God. But then, memory isn’t my strong suit. It comes and goes
with a will of its own.

The last time it came back to
me I was sunk in one of those late-winter depressions. Then one night I
switched on the television set, and a fire of events burst before my eyes.

Jumping in and out of history at will, God meets all the
big names—Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Dante, Einstein—and gives the reader a full
lowdown on each. He views Moses as more of a bureaucrat than a prophet and
deplores the absurd list of rules he sets out as holy writ. And although God
admits Jesus as His son (Catholics beware: It’s not exactly an immaculate
conception), He sees no real reason why Jesus has to martyr himself.

But the novel’s subtle layering
causes God’s criticism of these visionaries to fall back on Himself. He simply
wants people to be happy, to enjoy the wonders of His universe, but He hasn’t
equipped them for happiness or understanding. He can’t even be happy Himself.
So it’s up to Moses to find a way of making sense of the world, even if it’s
through petty rules and regulations.

Jesus also emerges vindicated,
even though he’s more of a trickster and manipulator than a deity. He sees
humanity’s need for a savior and provides a tangible—if slightly
bogus—connection to the mysterious, which is more than the philosophically
paralyzed God ever does.

Still, despite His shortcomings,
God comes off as a pretty decent fellow. He doesn’t demand that we kill each
other over holy land, condemn the so-called immoral, or even go to church. He
simply asks that we try to get along and enjoy what He’s given us. Interestingly,
this attitude sounds a lot like secular humanism, which, coming from God, may
be one of the richest and most instructive ironies in religious literature.

This novel’s great triumph,
however, is its terrifying and illuminating re-evaluation of traditional
eschatology. Achieving nearly Biblical resonance, The Life of God (as Told
by Himself) brilliantly depicts the growing incompatibility between God and
His creation. Ferrucci has produced a near-masterpiece of anti-apocalyptic
prophecy.

Junot Díaz’s debut collection, Drown, arrives at an
interesting time in the history of the English language. With Congress pushing
for an “English-only” state, and with conservative word-hawks like William
Safire trying to keep the language from expanding, Díaz’s Spanglish comes on
like a wake-up call for America’s tired ears and tongues.

Drown mixes English and Spanish street dialect to create some of the
finest, most sublime prose this side of the Atlantic:

When times were real flojo, when the last colored bill
flew out of Mami’s purse, she packed us off to our relatives. She’d use
Wilfredo’s father’s phone to make the calls early in the morning. Lying next to
Rafa, I’d listen to her soft, unhurried requests and pray that our relatives
would tell her to vete pa’ carajo but that never happened in Santo Domingo.

The collection follows one boy, Yunior, through his
childhood in the Dominican Republic, his adolescence in Nueva York, and
his eventual exploration of his family’s past. Díaz accentuates this cyclical
pattern with radical shifts in his storytelling approach: He writes the first
seven stories in first person, with Yunior as the narrator, and in the eighth
story Yunior narrates in second person. And in the last two stories, Yunior
narrates mostly in third person, seemingly taking the writing duties away from
Díaz.

Like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in
reverse, Drown circles into the past to find his character’s voice. And
what a voice it is. This collection marks the arrival of a major new talent.

Do you sometimes feel like you’re a character in a novel? Do you dream, like
Madame Bovary, that thousands of eyes watch your every move and that some
benevolent author has planned a series of enlightening adventures for you? Then
maybe you’re the protagonist of Alina Reyes’ new novel, Behind Closed Doors.

Billed as “an adventure in which you are the hero (or
heroine),” Behind Closed Doors contains two sections, male and female,
and the reader can choose to be either. The novel has two beginnings, one at
each cover, so the male and female readers read toward each other.

Reyes seems to have gotten much of the inspiration for
this structure from Milorad Pavić, whose first novel, Dictionary of the
Khazars, exists in male and female versions, and whose latest work, The
Novel of Hero and Leander, was written toward the center from both ends. To
this Reyes adds a device borrowed from Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch—within
each section, the reader chooses the paths that most please him or her,
creating a new story with each reading. Each section (or gender) offers four or
five possible endings and an almost infinite variation of stories.

Reyes, however, adds her own wrinkle to the mix. Rather
than writing the novel in second person, telling the reader what he or she
does, she uses first person, making the reading feel more like a recitation or
a memory than a novel. With the reader as the “I,” the novel seems more intimate
and less separated from the reader. The device also strengthens the reader’s
feeling of autonomy, making the stories seem less ordained by the writer.

At each section’s beginning, the reader stops at a
traveling circus and enters a funhouse of sorts called “The doors of Eros.”
Within these doors the brave adventurer finds every variation of erotic
fantasy, and the paths follow the reader’s sexual and intellectual desires.
Along the way, a male reader finds nurses, secretaries, ogresses, amputees, ghosts,
and hermaphrodite angels to fulfill his desires. The woman finds pirates, Black
Knights, firemen, kilt-wearing bagpipe players, and even an aged version of
herself. Both sexes find innumerable voyeuristic opportunities for
self-abuse—glass doors, hidden portals, conveniently placed hotel windows—and
this voyeurism seems at first to be the whole point of the novel.

There’s much more to this than erotic pleasure, though.
Just when all the bumping and grinding starts to sound repetitive, each story
funnels through a middle section called “The Exchange.” Here the stories take
on a more serious tone, because instead of finding another sexual partner, the
reader/protagonist meets the author. In this exchange the protagonist and
author discuss the nature of writing, reading, desire, and free will,
illuminating Reyes’ motives as an author and provoking the reader to examine
why he or she reads—and lives.

Here the reader makes the choices that affect the final
outcome of the story. And despite the illusion of free will, here Reyes writes
with the heaviest hand. Of the possible endings, Reyes obviously favors the
choice of commitment to an idealized “true love.” All other endings leave the
reader pathetically alone and unhappy, as if love were the answer to all of life’s
problems.

Reyes’ slight puritanical streak is not this novel’s only
shortcoming, either. Even with the wacky innovations in structure and the
variety of Reyes’ sexual imagination, the novel often reads like a Penthouse
letter. Lacking any kind of lyrical edge—even in its most inspired and
riotous moments—the novel simply reports the mechanics of sex.

With little or no poetry in her erotica, the intimacy that
Reyes so strategically renders loses much of its immediacy. She sets up the
most amazing scenarios—two women and a battalion of firefighters, acrobatic sex
under the big-top, even sex with the reader’s own shadow—but the pedestrian
language mars the whole effect.

Often lapsing unwittingly into silliness, Reyes uses
phrases like “hard pine cone” and “rod” to describe a penis and “crack” and
“shell” to describe a vagina. The reader often ends up more amused at the
situation than aroused or enlightened.

Still, Behind Closed Doors offers much to the
adventurous reader. If only for Reyes’ treatise on the nature of authorship,
authority, and individual will, this novel is well worth reading. Well, maybe
that and the great cross-dressing scene….

Northfield, Minnesota native Siri Hustvedt stunned the international
literary community with her experimental 1992 novel, The Blindfold. Now
Hustvedt returns with a much more conventional second novel, The Enchantment
of Lili Dahl.

Set in the small town of Webster, Minnesota (a
fictionalization of Northfield, says Hustvedt), the novel draws a motley cast
of small-town characters into a sensational web of obsession and violence.

The protagonist, the beautiful ingénue Lili Dahl, works in
the Ideal Cafe and spends her nights as Hermia in a local production of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream.

Soon she enters into an affair with an exotic stranger, Ed
Shapiro, a painter transplanted from New York. At the same time, Lily develops
a strange interest in the 1932 murder of Helen Bodler, and a reclusive,
stuttering weirdo named Martin Petersen (who plays Cobweb in the play) starts
to show his interest in Lily.

The coincidence of all this happening at once seems
thoroughly unlikely, and the contrived tensions build to a climax that’s
straight out of Hollywood.

Hustvedt has an astonishing eye for characterization,
though, drawing a wholly believable and memorable cast, and it’s frustrating to
see them wasted on such a hokey plot. Despite her descent into the novel’s
ersatz drama, Lily remains an
intriguing combination of quaintness and transcendent wisdom. Her inarticulate
genius shines even through the silliest, most unbelievable circumstances.

Hustvedt also strings interesting motifs through this
flawed novel. With Lily and Martin Petersen acting out a drama on and off
stage, and with Martin’s psychotic final public display, the novel cleverly
skirts the line between reality and the stage, between life and art.